Web developers and programmers are always in search of new tools and procedures that will improve the performance of their websites. They also need to learn and implement search engine-friendly techniques to ensure that their sites are adequately optimized and able to perform as per the latest Google algorithm updates.

Ever since its release back in 2006, jQuery, the cross-browser, open-source library, has been used around the world, and its popularity has grown to such an extent that it is currently the most popular JavaScript library available to developers. In fact, some experts deem jQuery to be the best web development software based on its growth rate and usage.

Considering that some of the most visited sites are built on jQuery, it can be safely said that it is here to stay and grow.

What are the reasons behind jQuery’s growth as the preferred platform for developers?

You must be wondering why this platform has seen such exponential growth in the last few years. What are the factors that are making developers prefer this platform over others? Of course, it optimizes a website's performance, but how?

• User-friendliness: The first reason is probably the ease of use it offers. It is a lot easier to master than other JavaScript libraries. Besides the simple syntax, it also works with minimal coding and can still achieve the same functionality compared to standard JavaScript.

• Resources: It is a massive library, and it enables the user to perform a lot more tasks than other website building platforms.

• Community assistance: jQuery comes with a robust open source community that offers enhanced features quite regularly. The seasoned members devote themselves to religiously developing the platform further and enhancing its functionality. Thus, many prewritten plugins are already available for instant download that can render the site development process lightning fast.

• A comprehensive website: jQuery’s official site is nothing short of a treasure trove! It offers detailed documentation along with step by step tutorials that can help even a beginner with programming tasks.

• Ajax support: Constant Ajax support is available for jQuery developers. Using this platform, you can easily develop Ajax templates. It also helps to make user interfaces sleeker, making them more convenient for use. With Ajax templates, you can perform and complete actions on a page without having to reload the page. An easily navigable user interface is one of the leading factors that keep visitors hooked to a site.

What is noteworthy is that despite its multiple benefits, jQuery or any JavaScript comes with some pitfalls which can adversely affect the SEO of a website. Let us explore some aspects that will help you make sure that using jQuery does not lead to reduced SEO performance. We will also discuss how to use optimization benefits to get more web traffic.

How to make jQuery websites more SEO-friendly?

Having an excellent user interface is not enough for a website. You need to optimize it for the search engines to improve SERP rankings so that your target audience can find you every time they search for a targeted keyword. Here are a few tips that will get you started!

• Slim down HTML tagging wherever you can. There are primarily two ways to ensure that you have as many HTML tags as you need. First, you need to dynamically add code, which is required for the smooth functioning of the user interface after the page loads fully. Secondly, you need to remove auto-generated coding where it is unnecessary.

• Avoid creating blank links which are practically useless. More often than not, the button or trigger used for a jQuery tag is an anchor tag, which points nowhere. Such links should be avoided.

• You should offer a non-JavaScript version that is a static version of relevant content on the page. It works well from the SEO point of view.

• You should not create the HTML to fit your site's jQuery. In fact, it should be the other way around so that the pages become easily accessible to end users.

• Be careful to keep jQuery out of your HTML page, preferably in an external JavaScript file to avoid confusion.

There are areas where the impact of jQuery or any JavaScript can potentially make your SEO ineffective. These areas include "crawlability" or the search bot's ability to crawl the website, and "obtainability" or search bot's ability to gain information about the site's content. If search engines are blocked from crawling JavaScript, your website pages will not rank in the SERPs.

The tips mentioned above can help you steer clear of such common mistakes and boost your site's SEO. Also, make sure to arrange the scripts in order of precedence and reconfirm that the end user's experience is not getting hampered in any way at any point. With a little bit of patience and attention to detail, your site should be yielding desired results in terms of SEO soon enough!